Arundhati Roy Quotes, Status, and Thoughts

I don't want to be a victim. I don't want to disappear into the darkness.

People always loved best what they identified most with.

I am an artist and a writer, and I do think that one always places oneself in the picture to see where one fits.

To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination.

Of course, there's an alternative to terrorism: it's called justice.

Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.

Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant.

India is still flinching from a cultural insult, still looking for its identity.

Her grief grieved her. His devastated her.

To stay quiet is as political an act as speaking out.

Thousands are losing their jobs and homes, while corporations are being bailed out with billions of dollars.

Humans are animals of habit.

She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.

Human rights takes history out of justice.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things. And here we are with our crash helmets on, with concertina wire all around us.

I sometimes think I was perhaps the only girl in India whose mother said, "Whatever you do, don't get married". For me, when I see a bride, it gives me a rash. I find them ghoulish, almost.

Nilekani's technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with that of Bill Gates, as though lack of information is what is causing world hunger.

If you're not religious, then look at it this way. This world of ours is four thousand, six hundred million years old. It could end in an afternoon.

An old-growth forest, a mountain range or a river valley is more important and certainly more loveable than any country will ever be.

Cage the People, Free the Money. The only thing that is allowed to move freely - unimpeded - around the world today is money... capital.

But can we, should we, let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present?

If you want to control somebody, support them. Or marry them.

America is like some crazed, bewildered, rich giant bumbling around in a poor area with his pockets stuffed with money, and lots of weapons - just throwing stuff around.

I never do anything because I'm a celebrity, as a rule. I do what I do as a citizen.

the truth is that it's far easier to make a bomb than to educate four hundred million people.

The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.

That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.

This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.

There is a war that makes us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.

And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature.

In India, whichever language you write in, the possibility of people not understanding irony or not understanding [remains there]. This as a writer is most terrifying!

Truly, there's no alternative to stupidity. Cretinism is the mother of fascism. I have no defence against it, really....

He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious.

If he touched her, he couldn't talk to her, if he loved her he couldn't leave, if he spoke he couldn't listen, if he fought he couldn't win.

The people who are getting rich can't imagine that the world is not a better place.

India's a very interesting place... there's no formal opposition, but there's genuine on-the-ground opposition.

When I'm outside the cities I do feel optimistic. There is such grandeur in India and so much beauty.

Human beings seem unable to live without war, but they are also unable to live without love.

… he remained restrained and strangely composed. It was a composure born of extreme provocation. It stemmed from a lucidity that lies beyond rage.

The writer is the midwife of understanding.

It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word.

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.

Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.

The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all.

Your enemies are always manufactured to suit your purpose, right? How can you have a good enemy? You have to have an utterly evil enemy - and then the evilness has to progress.

It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used.

Peace, Inc. is sometimes as worrying as War, Inc. It's a way of managing public anger. We're all being managed, and we don't even know it.

There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.

Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.

Even capitalists must surely admit, that intellectually at least, socialism is a worthy opponent. It imparts intelligence even to its adversaries.

India lives in several centuries at the same time.

The American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government's policies, that are so hated.

The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.

Whatever else their faults may be, they were not radical Islamist states - Iraq was not, Syria is not, Libya was not. The most radical fundamentalist Islamist state is, of course, your America's Saudi Arabia.

The NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown in. Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary.

Flags are bits of colored cloth used first to shrinkwrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.

Excitement always leads to tears.

Money need not be our only reward.

What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.

I am completely a loner. In my head I want to feel I can be anywhere. There is a sort of recklessness that being a loner allows me.

Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.

NGOs have a complicated space in neoliberal politics. They are supposed to mop up the anger. Even when they are doing good work, they are supposed to maintain the status quo. They are the missionaries of the corporate world.

Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century.

Is globalization about 'the eradication of world poverty,' or is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated?

Fascism itself can only be turned away if all those who are outraged by it show a commitment to social justice that equals the intensity of their indignation.

Sometimes there's truth in old cliches. There can be no real peace without justice. And without resistance there will be no justice.

The revolution cannot be funded. It's not the imagination of trusts and foundations that's going to bring real change.

When people say "the people" or "the public" as though it's the final repository of all morality, I sometimes flinch.

Many people have accused me of having a romantic view, whereas I personally I feel sorry for those who have lost romance in their lives.

Things can change in a day.

Some things come with their own punishments.

I feel ashamed that the new, nuclear, neo-liberal India thinks of itself as a 'natural ally' of Israel. Ever since India began to call itself an emerging superpower, it has become a slavish, groveling satellite state of the US.

If you're happy in a dream, does that count?

It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened.

Violating human rights is integral to the project of neoliberalism and global hegemony.

The world's 'freeest' country has the highest number in prison.

Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.

Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.

I could weep for a river-valley, and I have. But for a country? Oh man, I don't know.

Anything's possible in Human Nature ...Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy.

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

States have invested themselves with the right to legitimise violence - so who gets criminalised and delegitimised? Only - or well that's excessive - usually, the resistance.

Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn't matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.

Railing against the past will not heal us. History has happened. It's over and done with. All we can do is to change its course by encouraging what we love instead of destroying what we don't.

The idea of justice - even just dreaming of justice - is revolutionary. The language of human rights tends to accept a status quo that is intrinsically unjust - and then tries to make it more accountable.

NGOs are dangerous. They do what the missionaries used to do in Colonial times. They are Trojan Horses. The worse the situation, the more the NGOs.

Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. They're usually fought for hegemony, for business. And then of course there's the business of war.

We need a new kind of politics. Not the politics of governance, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of joining hands across the world and preventing certain destruction.

There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable.

That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.

The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.

...a political struggle that does not have women at the heart of it, above it, below it, and within it is no struggle at all.

Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.

Empathy may be the single most important quality that must be nurtured to give peace a fighting chance.

Use your art to fight.

If we were to lose the ability to be emotional, if we were to lose the ability to be angry, to be outraged, we would be robots. And I refuse that.

As a woman who grew up in a village in India, I've spent my whole life fighting tradition. There's no way that I want to be a traditional Indian housewife.

The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.

He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.